MixFix Busting Bureaucracy Hackathon

Over the last 100 years, bureaucracy—that mashup of military command structures and industrial management processes—has dominated how organizations operate. Bureaucracy may be one of humankind’s more powerful inventions . . . if you’re after efficiency at scale. But when the goal is anything other than efficiency—when it’s adaptability or innovation or unleashing human potential—bureaucracy turns out to be an almost insurmountable impediment. Bureaucracies, by their very nature, are inertial, incremental and uninspiring.

Over the last 100 years, bureaucracy—that mashup of military command structures and industrial management processes—has dominated how organizations operate. Bureaucracy may be one of humankind’s more powerful inventions . . . if you’re after efficiency at scale. But when the goal is anything other than efficiency—when it’s adaptability or innovation or unleashing human potential—bureaucracy turns out to be an almost insurmountable impediment. Bureaucracies, by their very nature, are inertial, incremental and uninspiring.

Problem is, in a world where customers are omnipotent, where barriers to entry are crumbling, where advantages are fleeting, and where employees, like citizens, flee authoritarian regimes, efficiency isn’t anywhere near enough.

That’s why we’ve teamed up with our friends at Dell to launch the Busting Bureaucracy Hackathon. Over the next several weeks, we’ll be working with hundreds of progressive IT and management practitioners to discover and develop new management practices that embody the benefits of bureaucracy (discipline, focus, efficiency) without its significant costs. In the process, we aim to lay the groundwork for the post-bureaucratic organisation.